National Geographic

114 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • FEBRUARY 2018Gabi, and dropped the item so that it landed rightat her feet. “Look! A toy!” she cried, scooping up aminiature rubber squid and spinning with joy—a dance Babyface watched from his perch. “See,he knows exactly what I like.”Are the crows actually doing what humans do,bringing gifts to a friend because she’s been kindto them? Can a crow—or any bird—make deci-sions of this sort? Researchers studying crows, ra-vens, and other corvids (the family of songbirdsthat includes crows, jays, rooks, magpies, andothers) say yes. Indeed the similarities amonghumans, other primates, and these birds haveriveted scientists studying the origin of our—andother animals’—intellectual abilities. “Birds tooka different evolutionary path from mammals buthave arrived at seemingly similar cognitive solu-tions,” says Nathan Emery, a cognitive biologistat Queen Mary University, London, “so they offera rare opportunity to understand what evolution-ary pressures lead to certain mental skills.”Even so, until this century most scientistswould have scoffed at the notion of a choosy,generous crow because crows and all birds (andmost mammals) were thought to be robotic sim-pletons, capable only of reacting instinctivelyto things that happened to them. Birds weredismissed as “birdbrains” even before the scien-tist Ludwig Edinger misinterpreted their neuralanatomy, around 1900. He thought birds lackeda neocortex, the thinking area in the mamma-lian brain where much of our higher cognitivefunctioning— working memory, planning, andproblem solving—occurs.Despite this supposed mental deficit, birdswere used throughout the 20th century by com-parative psychologists in their animal cognitionstudies. They particularly favored common pi-geons, whose brains are just about the size of ashelled peanut, and canaries and zebra finches,whose brains are even smaller. Pigeons, scien-tists discovered, have impressive memories,